Anthropological Poetics

INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION, AND REPRESENTATIONAnthropological Poetics

37ANTHROPOLOGICAL POETICS

u Ivan Brady

Poetics is a topic usually associated with thesystematic study of literature, but, espe-cially in its modern concern with texts as

“cultural artifacts,” it extends to anthropologyin several ways.1 One obvious connection isthat, like other academic disciplines, anthropol-ogy is “literary” in that it conveys its informa-tion primarily through writing. This textualbase lets anthropology share with more conven-tional studies of poetics an interest in text con-struction, the authority of the text, semiotic be-havior and the production of meaning indiscourse, and, in general, all the philosophicaland critical problems associated with mime-sis—the representation and successful commu-nication of experience in any form, especially asproblematized in texts. It also brings to the fore

something that anthropology is predisposed toengage because of its own diverse history: de-bate over the place of art and science in the so-cial sciences and the humanities. Anthropologyhas intellectual camps at both extremes, that is,strong science orientations that conscientiouslyattempt to exclude more artistic or humanisticmethods and interpretations, and vice versa (seeFujimara, 1998). Overall there is a compromiseof identity: Anthropology sees itself as an “art-ful science” (Brady, 1990a, 1993). That leavesroom for engaging a variety of postmodernchallenges from other disciplines, includingmuch that has arisen under the labels literaryand poetic (Brady, 1991b).

Cultural anthropology in particular encom-passes both individualized studies and system-

u 949

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This chapter is a substantially revised and expanded version of Brady (1996). It has benefittedfrom generous readings by James A. Boon, Norman K. Denzin, Robert Borofsky, Dan Rose, Miles Richardson,Yvonna S. Lincoln, James W. Fernandez, and Barbara Tedlock, and I wish to thank them. Any remaining wronghead-edness is entirely my own. “Shaman’s Song” is reprinted with permission of Station Hill Press (Barrytown, NewYork), from Stanley Diamond’s Totems (1982, p. 94).

atic comparisons of cross-cultural experience,so its potential poetic sources are broadly based.That has allowed anthropologists to feed intoand draw reciprocally on several disciplineswhile developing their own specialized studiesof the forms and content of poetic production intheir own societies, in other cultures, as well asin their communications about other cultures.2

Playing in such fields begs a variety of critical is-sues, from cultural relativism to competing phi-losophies of representation that have long histo-ries of contemplation in other disciplines andless attention in anthropology. Theorists fromother disciplines have reached into anthropol-ogy on similar issues (see Clifford, 1988; Clif-ford & Marcus, 1986; Krupat, 1992). But thecross-poaching that underwrites anthropol-ogy’s “literarization” and the “anthropolo-gizing” of literary studies is hard to measure andsubject to various interpretations.3 It has also re-sulted in some confusion over the degree towhich anthropology ought to rely on other dis-ciplines instead of creating its own adaptive so-lutions to the challenges posed, for example, re-garding “the effort to situate discoursessociologically, to show how discourses function,compete, and clash within sociopolitical arenas,and to trace how discourses are transformed his-torically” (Fischer, 1988, p. 8; compare Krupat,1992, pp. 51-52; Taylor, 1996).

One famous connection between anthropol-ogy and other disciplines that study poetics isstructuralism. Although now less popular (hav-ing been relegated mistakenly by some to thegraveyard of things buried by “postmodern”growth—see Brady, 1993), the structuralismdeveloped in this century by linguists Ferdinandde Saussure and Noam Chomsky, psychologistJean Piaget, and especially anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss had a profound impact onliterary studies in the 1960s and 1970s.4 Theconcept of poetics and what might constitute alegitimate study of it has been permanentlychanged as a result, and the possibilities for de-marcating something clearly as anthropologicalpoetics have been complicated in the process.5

That doesn’t disappoint most of the moderncritics who operate happily between the cracks

of conventional divisions. Poetics is now morethan ever an interdisciplinary topic that right-fully resists such reductions. Nevertheless, an-thropology’s footprints tend to be distinctive,so marking its path through this terrain is notimpossible. Even though anthropological in-quiry into poetics lacks coherence as a special-ized field, we can locate it pragmatically by in-specting what anthropologists have done with itand by marking the intersections of their workwith like-minded activities from elsewhere.

Without departing entirely from the com-mon literary grounds of writing as a form of ex-pression and what constitutes author-ity in thefirst place, anthropological studies of poeticsdiffer from those of most other disciplines byreaching into performance issues in discourse,including studies of ritual and worldview, fromtribal societies to modern theater, and their rela-tionships to language and culture.6 Ethnopoetsin particular—cultural anthropologists, lin-guists, and poets who study other cultures froma poetic perspective—never lose sight of the lan-guage that structures and facilitates discourse,in oral or written form.7 These are some of thereasons the subject of anthropological poeticsgravitates naturally to sociolinguistics and lin-guistics in general (which has its own gradationsof science-minded versus more artful practitio-ners), residually to the empirically rigorousstudies of semantics and culture popularized inanthropology in the 1960s and 1970s as “cogni-tive anthropology” (see Tyler, 1969), and di-rectly to discourse-centered production in anyform, including writing. They are tied togetherby the instrumental role language plays in eachinstance.

The emphasis on the centrality of language inculture was also one of the original attractionsof structuralism and poetics to linguistics and atthe same time a brace for some of the earliestdiscontents with logical positivism in ethno-graphy, which historically has tried to keep itsrhetorical bases and authorship “invisible” as apretext of clinical distance. An increased under-standing of the collaborative nature of field-work and the need for more “reflexive” per-spectives on it relative to constructivist (e.g., the

950 u INTERPRETATION, EVALUATION, AND REPRESENTATION

reader reception theories of scholars such assemiologist Umberto Eco and literary criticRoland Barthes) and multivocal interpretationsof literature (following especially the seminalwork of Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin) havealso spurred the development of a criticaldialogics for linguistics and anthropology as awhole.8 The challenge for a dialogic poetics isthat it “must first of all be able to identify andarrange relations between points of view: Itmust be adequate to the complex architecton-ics that shape the viewpoint of the author to-ward his characters, the characters toward theauthor, and all of these toward each other”(Holquist, 1990, p. 162). Ethnographers havebeen attracted to this kind of argument pre-cisely because it defines both the relationshipsand the constraints on self-conscious cross-cul-tural research and writing. But the subsequentturn to linguistics as science and model for cul-tural and textual studies and to language insome strict sense as the key to ethnographic in-vestigation has proved to be inadequate—or atleast incomplete—and is the source of many ofthe indeterminacies in philosophy and methodthat characterize current debate on ethnographicrepresentation and interpretation.9

The interdisciplinary stretch of what can bemarked as the anthropological version ofpoetics thus covers a lot of ground. It rangesfrom a self-conscious interest in poetry, con-ceived brightly by poet Rita Dove (1994) as“the art of making the interior life of one indi-vidual available to others” (p. 25; see alsoPrattis, 1986, 1997), on the one hand, to muchmore inclusive analytic interests that are per-haps best contained by French critic PaulValéry’s (1964) concept of poetics as “every-thing that bears on the creation or compositionof works having language at once as their sub-stance and their instrument” (p. 86; see alsoBrady, 1991a), on the other. Splicing into thatfuzzy framework from many directions, an-thropological poetics nevertheless settlesmainly into three subcategories of inquiry,which are not mutually exclusive: (a)ethnopoetics, (b) literary anthropology, and (c)anthropological poetry.

u Ethnopoetics

Ethnopoetics may be the most conspicuously an-thropological activity in a poetic domain. DennisTedlock (1992), a pioneer in the field, defines itas the “study of the verbal arts in a worldwiderange of languages and cultures” (p. 81). It fo-cuses primarily on “the vocal-auditory channelof communication in which speaking, chanting,or singing voices give shape to proverbs, riddles,curses, laments, praises, prayers, prophecies,public announcements, and narratives” (p. 81).The goal in such studies is “not only to analyzeand interpret oral performances but also to makethem directly accessible through transcriptionsand translations that display their qualities asworks of art” (p. 81). Much has been done toreach this goal since ethnopoetics was inventedas a special genre of inquiry in the United Statesin the late 1960s.

Poet-ethnographer Jerome Rothenberg coinedthe term ethnopoetics in 1968 and is properlyconsidered to be “the father of American ethno-poetics” (Tarn, 1991, p. 75). His most instructivethoughts on this topic are collected in edited vol-umes that also illustrate the diverse intellectualinspiration this movement owes to various socialscientists, ethnographers, and poets (includingespecially Henry David Thoreau, GertrudeStein, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, and WilliamBlake), and to other influential social thinkers(such as Giambattista Vico and surrealist TristanTzara—see Rothenberg & Rothenberg, 1983).Some of Rothenberg’s other work (e.g., 1981,1985) digs deeper into the roots of “oral poetry”(see Finnegan, 1992a, 1992b) and related tradi-tions as old as the late Pleistocene (see Brady,1990b; Tarn, 1991, p. 15) and as momentous asthe birth of theater and poetry in shamanism(Rothenberg, 1981). A common theme through-out is an attempt to close the distance modernthinking tends to put between “us” and “them,”both historically and as these artificial bound-aries are used to separate us from the per-formative traditions of “ex-primitives” aroundthe globe today (see Bauman, 1977, 1992;MacCannell, 1992; Schechner, 1995). The au-

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thor of numerous books of poetry, Rothenbergwas also a cofounder (with Dennis Tedlock) andcoeditor of the radical magazine Alcherin-ga/Ethnopoetics, which featured “transcripts,translations, and tear-out disc recordings of per-formances by indigenous verbal artists from Af-rica, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas” (D.Tedlock, 1992, pp. 81-82). It was keenly fo-cused on developing ethnopoetics, on freeingpoetries of all kinds from the “monolithic greattradition” of Western literature, and on explor-ing new techniques of translating the poetry oftribal societies. Although Alcheringa is no lon-ger in print, its experimentalism continues tocharacterize the field of ethnopoetics today (seeespecially Tedlock, 1983, 1990, 1992).

The innovative work of linguist-anthropolo-gists Dell Hymes, Robert Duncan, and GeorgeQuasha, anthropologist-poet Stanley Diamond,and other poets who, like Rothenberg, have hadsome training in anthropology or linguistics, in-cluding David Antin and Gary Snyder, must alsobe considered in calculating the intellectual his-tory of ethnopoetics. Their collective scholar-ship has influenced all the others who have con-tributed to the development and preservation ofthis genre since the early 1970s. One such per-son was anthropologist Victor Turner. Writingmore than a decade and half ago about the con-nection of ethnopoetics to his own work on rit-ual, Turner (1983) suggested that ethnopoeticsoffers a way of renewing recognition of “thedeep bonds between body and mentality, uncon-scious and conscious thinking, species and self ”that “have been treated without respect, asthough they were irrelevant for analytical pur-poses” in much of the intellectual discoursefrom anthropology’s colonial period (p. 338).He also noted poignantly that the resurgence ofethnopoetics “comes at a time when knowledgeis being increased of other cultures, otherworldviews, other life styles, when Westerners,endeavoring to trap non-Western philosophiesand poetries in the corrals of their own cogni-tive constructions, find that they have caughtsublime monsters, eastern dragons, lords offructile chaos, whose wisdom makes our knowl-edge look somehow shrunken and inadequate”(p. 338). Appropriate to bridging ethnopoetics

and anthropology’s struggle for a postcolonialidentity, such concerns also lead directly intothe realm of humanistic anthropology.10

Anthropologist-linguist Keith Basso (1988)points to another major problem still on theethnopoetic horizon that is centered in thelarger issue of hegemonic discourse—a culturalbias or override in the linguistic and intellectualforms we use to appropriate and representcross-cultural experience. There is, Basso says,“a growing conviction among linguistic anthro-pologists that the oral literatures of NativeAmerican people have been inaccurately char-acterized, wrongly represented, and improperlytranslated.” For the better part of a century, “thespoken productions of Native American story-tellers have been presented as pieces of prosewhose formal divisions are marked by para-graphs and sentences.” Recent research indi-cates that this is a fundamental distortion of therecord. It appears that “Native American story-tellers often spoke—and in some Indian com-munities continue to speak today—in forms ofmeasured verse” (p. 809).11 The ethnopoetictask is to decide on the kinds of evidence that“attest to the existence of these poetic forms”and to answer a variety of related questions:“Given a properly recorded text, together witha knowledge of the language in which it wasmade, how should analysis proceed? Whatkinds of theoretical constructs are called foralong the way, and how should these constructsbe modified and refined?” (Basso, 1988,p. 809).12 Answering these questions sweepsthrough many of the postmodern challengesthat have surfaced in ethnopoetics and anthro-pology in general in the past 20 years. The con-cerns cluster around cultural and historical“situatedness”—our inability to devise a cul-ture-free or purely objective view of anything. Itis hard to avoid the argument that scholarlywork is culturally constructed, rhetorically con-ditioned, tropological, empowered with a pointof view, and addled with imperfections, distor-tion, and incompleteness. Everything a scholarproduces is, in effect, “textual” in every sense ofthe term (see also Rorty, 1979, 1981; White,1973, p. xii). Just how “literary” anthropologywants to be in the face of these challenges has


emerged as a serious question and a point ofmuch debate.

u Literary Anthropology

While the study of relations between anthro-pology and literary theory is still unfolding,13

the major points of entry into them were pio-neered in anthropology by Clifford Geertz(1973, 1983, 1988). In much the same way thatHayden White’s celebrated “contention of theinherent ‘literariness’ of history significantlyprefigured the way a number of theorists andhistorians are now reading anthropology, thatis, as text, as writing that is necessarily boundwithin the parameters of discourse,” so it is that“Clifford Geertz’s anthropological writingsover the past two decades have similarly af-firmed the ultimately discursive nature of an-thropology by holding that cultural interplay isitself semiotic, a system of signs that can be in-terpreted by the culture-reader” (Manganaro,1990b, p. 15). Pursuing this has had a dramaticeffect on ideas about the craft and purpose ofethnography, but the linking up with literaryinterests has not been too much of a stretch foranthropology in some respects: “We knowmany reasons to emphasize what literatureshares with other kinds of human expression.We know how readily we transform literary tonon-literary knowledge, and vice versa. Wealso know how fuzzy matters may be at their in-tellectual margins” (Miner, 1990, p. 12)—andtherein lies much of the problem: It is “fuzzy”on the boundaries. That notwithstanding forthe moment, with both the same and a differentsubject by metaphoric extension—“texts” and“cultures as texts”—some anthropologistshave pushed Geertz’s premises to argue thattheir discipline can function as a form of cul-tural critique not unlike that promoted in moreobviously literary circles.14 Transcending thenaïve conception of ethnography as easily ap-prehended cross-cultural description, influen-tial anthropologist-critic George Marcus(1988) gives its poetic a simultaneous shot of

aesthetic value and authority: “When done art-fully,” he says, “description takes the form ofauthoritative narration of cultural processes”(p. 68). It has the character of allegory (Clifford,1988) in any case and produces a kind of layeredartifact loaded with variable cultural disposi-tions and competing political concerns that aresituated in “terms of the social construction ofliterary realism” (Feld, 1987, p. 190). Themuch-discussed perspectives of “interpretive an-thropology” were born of such concerns.15

By keeping questions of authorship at centerfocus and by exploring the evocative equation ofcultures as texts that participant observers mustlearn how to “read” in culturally authenticways,16 Marcus and several other anthropolo-gists have since the early 1980s devoted consid-erable effort to evaluating the utility of such met-aphors and to understanding how the methodsand theories of interpreting literature mighttransfer to the interpretation of their own writ-ings, to the study of other cultures so conceived,as well as to the specific study of indigenous oralnarratives.17 The “rich contemporary produc-tion of fiction and literature from most parts ofthe third world” is another “object of analysisthat combines ethnography and literary criti-cism” (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 74).18 It is“important not only as a guide for . . . inquiries inthe field . . . [but also] for suggesting ways inwhich the form of the ethnography might be al-tered to reflect the kind of cultural experiencesthat find expression both in indigenous writingand in the ethnographer’s fieldwork” (Marcus &Fischer, 1986, p. 74) and ultimately function “asa form of cultural critique of ourselves” (Marcus& Fischer, 1986, p. 1; see also Williams, 1998).

This work has been expanded critically19 andextended creatively20 in various ethnographicand historical contexts. But the growing literari-ness of the process has become increasinglyproblematic, including the issue of how to writeas an anthropologist and questions about theplace of fiction in “realistic” ethnographies (seeBanks & Banks, 1998; Ellis & Bochner, 1996;Rapport, 1997). Geertz (1988) first raised the is-sue of anthropological writing’s being inescap-ably fictional in the sense of being “somethingmade, something constructed”—a strategic fab-


rication that is not necessarily untrue, but can-not escape its fictional character simply byadopting realism as a mode of exposition or byclaiming clear authority on another form of lifeonly on the basis of having “been there”(pp. 4-5). Ethnographic authority derives neces-sarily from a much more creative, self-inter-ested, historically and culturally situated cir-cumstance in which the author is inevitably aconfabulator between his or her own experi-ences and those of Others in some mutually con-structed communication. It is established mostdirectly as a “writerly act” (Geertz, 1988);ethnographic knowledge is “really created byconventions of writing” (Fabian, 1990, p. 762).By being dedicated generally to representingpeoples without writing, ethnography differen-tiates itself from the writing of literature andhistory per se (Manganaro, 1990b). But, despiteits needs for objectivity and the defiance ofethnocentrism, ethnographic writing can “nolonger be seen as a natural or organic extensionof content”; the anthropological writer “eitherplugs into preexisting plot structures or createsa new structure out of the amalgam of oldforms” (Manganaro, 1990b, p. 15). By allowingno culturally or linguistically unconstructed ac-cess to reality—no story structures uncondi-tioned by history—and by virtue of its roots inthe “fuzzy” cross-cultural margins of anthropo-logical fieldwork, ethnographic representationis thus conducive to developing the kinds ofcompeting interpretations that go with the dec-laration of “fuzzy” boundaries on any topic. Inthat capacity it easily lends itself to furtheranalogizing of the situation as ambiguous“text.” 21

The attempt to reconcile the role of theauthor, the place of fiction, and related literaryenmeshments in ethnography’s realist writingtradition leads to two underexamined develop-ments in the field, one old and one new, and itbegs a third. First, it shows the need for a criticalreexamination of writing constructions and re-alist assumptions in anthropology’s only estab-lished poetic genre, the ethnographic novel.22

Second, there is an active search on in manyquarters of anthropology to adopt more obvi-ously literary forms that can be used to enhance

communication of the ethnographic experiencein the realist tradition, including those withgreater “writer consciousness” (e.g., where theauthor appears in first person as narrator andactor in the ethnographic account, contrary tothe positivist tradition).23 Although there arenow many variations on this theme,24

Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1961) is by farthe best known of all such works and was foun-dational in “its resistance to the duty of directlyrendering the anthropological subject.”25 It“represents the anthropological text that per-haps most influenced current speculation on thenature of anthropological representation”(Manganaro, 1990b, p. 17). One enduring con-sequence is that anthropologists are much morealert to their roles as writers and critics today inethnographic and historical research,26 and tothe role of writing and criticism more generallyin anthropological method and theory.27

Third, the new emphasis on creative con-struction and prolonged attention to anthropol-ogy’s inevitable textual involvement has createda kind of epistemological havoc. It not only pitspositivism against all of the great deconstructive“undoings” of late, it also means the loss of in-visibility in writing as part of the realist tradi-tion. That is a direct challenge to science’s myth-ical perpetuation of the unobtrusive sign(compare Barthes, 1972). By accentuating theform of the message rather than the contents ofits speech acts, the literary or poetic takes for itsprimary object what science does not. In theformalist sense, we can cull out a measure of lit-erariness in any text and call it poeticity: the de-gree to which a work flags the linguistic natureof its own being; the degree to which it empha-sizes materiality versus transparency throughself-referencing linguistic forms (see Jakobson,1987). A text high in poeticity, whether prose orverse, in this sense signals itself in place insteadof disappearing; it celebrates the signifier overthe signified without abandoning the basic com-munication function it shares as discourse withmore scientific or historically authentic calcula-tions, albeit through very different channels(compare Levine, 1987, 1994). Writing in a waythat does not call attention to itself in order toallow the objective observer to focus directly on


the “reality” of the subject is a delusion—a spe-cial kind of fiction and desire that helps to turn“culture” into “nature” in the common view. Ithides precepts and politics alike behind thepower of the sign and makes them look invisi-ble (Brady, 1991a, p. 216). The narrative dis-course of science, as in art, is created out of theinteraction of such cultural conventions andsituations, the way the author deploys themthrough particular language codes, and thereader’s process of reception (creative con-struction) that releases meaning from the text.Clarity of meaning itself takes on new meaningin this context. It lacks absolutes. It becomes amanipulable cultural code, reckoned with fa-miliarity and history—still “fuzzy” around theedges. It cannot be a culture-free peek at theuniverse enabled by a mythical objectivity(Brady, 1991b, p. 19; see also Bruner, 1986,1990; compare Barthes, 1968).

Science, of course, needs language to func-tion, but unlike literature, it neither asserts norsees itself as situated within language. The con-spicuously poetic author willingly appears inhis or her text as an artisan whose constant dis-play is the craft of language (the language andform of the poem is claimed by the poet andmust be read through that claim—a proprietaryfunction) or as a person who visibly leads theprose narrative from within. The scientific au-thor tries to avoid both, aspiring to invisibilityin every place except the opening credits of hisor her cover page (compare Geertz, 1988,pp. 7-8; Manganaro, 1990b, pp. 15-16). Theresulting gap between author and text is a pitfor various detached composition strategies,including anthropology’s great timeless fictionof writing in the ethnographic present.Authorial invisibility enhances the prospect forsmuggling distancing time frames (we are“present” and full of time; Others are “past”and “timeless”)28 into the argument, not tomention excessively clinical assumptions ofphilosophy, including the possibility of “mirrorof nature minds” in observation and communi-cation and related forms of objectivity (Rorty,1979). Calling “into question the very lan-guage by which modern science knows its lan-guage,” thereby bringing its invisible signs back

into conscious orbit, Barthes (1986, p. 5) con-cludes, can thus only be done by writing, itself acondition of language.

Philosophical justification in the criticism ofinterpretive anthropology and its textual turnhave waned since Dreyfus and Rabinow’s (1983)challenging evaluation of Michel Foucault’sthinking and its relevance to cultural anthropol-ogy.29 Any serious reengagement of interpretiveanthropology with modern science (and, to somedegree, with archaeology and physical anthro-pology—compare Hodder, 1986; Tilley, 1990)will have to resurrect the historical points atwhich epistemological concerns began to recedein anthropology and then build from there. Lit-erary anthropology, as part of the emerging criti-cal tradition in textual studies, rests on a similarfate if it is ever to close the loop of its critical de-parture from modern science concerns with ex-planation per se and much that has been rejectedarbitrarily in the zeal to construct powerful argu-ments about representation, historical situated-ness, and author-ity in general. As Fabian (1990)suggests, “Dialogical and poetic conceptions ofethnographic knowledge touch the heart ofquestions about othering. But they have a chanceto change the shape of ethnography only if theylead to literary processes that are hermeneu-tic-dialectical, or ‘practical,’ rather than repre-sentational” (p. 766). On the other hand, manyof the participants in anthropology’s literaryturn have no interest whatsoever in closing thatlarger loop with any method, theory, or languagethat resembles the status quo ante in their field(Brady, 1991b, pp. 12-13). Theirs is a more cre-ative turn to be considered critically before anylarger inclusions are attempted.30 Followingideas that have “already been claimed by variousforms of radical anthropology,” which see “thediscipline as a handmaiden to an era of Europeanand American imperialism,” Nathaniel Tarn(1991) suggests that intellectual studies—per-haps properly conceived as Wittgensteinian lan-guage games—should keep their identities assuch and not be promoted to some Archimedianlevel of essential Truth or “used for oppressivepurposes or any pretence at superior knowl-edge” (p. 57).31 Anthropological poetry has sur-faced in a similar humanistically grounded con-


text as a distinctly literary activity crossed overto social science.

u Anthropological Poetry

If ethnopoetics is the most conspicuous anthro-pological activity in a poetics domain, anthro-pological poetry is easily qualified in the con-verse as the most conspicuously poetic activityin an anthropological domain.32 Such worktends to focus on cross-cultural themes, esotericcultural information, the experiences of doingfieldwork in other cultures, and so on. Its dis-tinctive characteristic is the presentation of thatinformation in marked poetic form. Set in ananthropological mode, poetry is a conspicu-ously linguistic message loaded with criticalcommentary on the nature of the world and ourplace in it (Brady, 1991a, p. 216). Through po-etic portrayal, although perhaps fictional at thelevel of precise time and sequence of events, an-thropological poets often attempt to convey thecross-cultural circumstances and events of theirfieldwork in an authentic and penetrating way(see Flores, 1982, 1999; Prattis, 1986). The aimin this poetry is not to exist only for its own sakeor self, or merely to entertain, but to flag its lan-guage without losing its historical or ethno-graphic referentiality and authenticity—thereby constituting a paradox of the first or-der.33 But it is the conspicuously linguistic forms(such as the self-halting process of poetic linephrasing) that give it poeticity, not its commen-tary—that is its anthropological part. This raisesthe issue of writer consciousness once again, thedegree to which authors should or must appearas such in their discourse, and therefore crossesthe boundary that traditionally has divided sci-entific writing (and observation) from otherforms.

Poetics leads to the aesthetic, which, as partof a general concern for the making of meaningin what we do and study (see Brady, 1991b;Flores, 1985), can be engaged in radical forms,including but not limited to poetry, withoutcompletely abandoning seemingly contrary in-

terests such as scientific observation. Althoughpoetry is not science and does not aspire to bescience (Diamond, 1986c, p. 132), some of thework of at least the kind of science produced byethnographers is intruded upon by the anthro-pological poet. By varying their forms of expres-sion to include poetry, anthropologists attemptto say things that might not be said as effectivelyor at all any other way. This is consistent withthe need to discover and examine critically all ofthe ways a subject (including social and culturalrelationships) can be represented. In that diver-sity the anthropological poet finds a measure oftruth. But the Cartesian critic sees another ver-sion: By reporting fieldwork experiencesthrough poetry, the author invokes a form ofsubjectivity to do the work of a form of objectiv-ity, the conventional ethnography (see Tarn,1991, p. 246). In the process, information maybe conveyed more as what “might” or “couldbe” than “what is” or “what was” as concretehistorical fact, and that is problematic (counter-intuitive) to modern science and to ethnographythat emulates its methods.

The pecking order of arguments in this in-stance has not always been the same. Poetry hasoccupied more respectable positions in some ofthe Truth camps of the past. It has not alwaysbeen so marginalized as intellectual activity.34

Aristotle recognized 2,400 years ago that be-cause poetry exacts universal judgments fromaction, from history, it can be considered (withmore than a little irony for the present argu-ment) at one level more scientific (or philosoph-ical) than history. It is a medium in which “thelessons of history do not become any more intel-ligible and they remain undemonstrated andtherefore merely probable, but they becomemore compendious and therefore more useful”(Collingwood, 1956, p. 25). Nevertheless, re-jected as method by the received wisdom of sci-ence since the Enlightenment, in part for its dec-laration of “ringing true” rather than “beingtrue” in some particular empirical and historicalaccountability of “what actually happened,” inpart for working in a kind of “fifth dimension,”independent of time and therefore “of a sortthat scientists cannot recognize” (Graves, 1971,p. 35; see also Bruner, 1986, p. 52), poetry is re-


introduced only with difficulty to any contextof specific empirical accountability, such asconcerns anthropology and the social sci-ences.35

The challenge of poetry for anthropologythus has several aspects. In addition to studyingthe uses to which poetry can be put, the con-texts in which it appears as discourse, and thevariability of its forms in specific cultures (itsethnopoetic dimensions), the challenge in-cludes the development of a genre of writingand reporting that systematically tries to incor-porate satisfying and edifying poetic quality(foregrounding for clarity as well as aestheticfunctions and the practical use of metaphor as atool of discovery) without sacrificing the es-sence of ethnographic accountability. In writ-ing anthropological poetry, an author attemptsto evoke a comparable experience or set of ex-periences through the reader’s experience withthe text on the twin assumptions that all hu-mans are tied together through certain substan-tive universals of being and that the beings weencounter are sufficiently like ourselves to beopen to empathic construction, discovery, andreporting (Quine’s principal of charity—seeShweder, 1996).

Perhaps one can also “extend to all dis-course what has been said of poetic discoursealone, because it manifests to the highest de-gree, when it is successful, the effect which con-sists in awakening experiences which vary fromone individual to another. . . . The paradox ofcommunication is that it presupposes a com-mon medium, but one which works—as isclearly seen in the limiting case in which, as of-ten in poetry, the aim is to transmit emo-tions—only by eliciting and reviving singular,and therefore socially marked, experiences”(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 39). In this way, whetherthrough poetry, a great novel, or a play, the an-thropological writer invites us to “livethrough” other experiences vicariously and,“through the power of metaphor, to comeaway with a deeper understanding of . . . thehuman condition” (Coward & Royce, 1981,p. 132). Anthropological humanists (some ofwhom are poets) look at this as the challenge ofwriting “from within” rather than “without”

and that of “good writing” in general, which, asmentioned earlier, is an important part of an-thropology’s emerging poetics.36

Clifford Geertz is well-known for the qualityof his writing, as are a few other anthropolo-gists.37 But theirs is not typical writing in the dis-cipline. In fact, as noted previously, and contraryto the kind of disciplinary protection historyclaims generally for the public accessibility of itswritings against the obtuse jargonizing of the so-cial sciences, not all anthropologists strive formore interesting and edifying ways of communi-cating anthropological experience. Appearing“too literary” (and certainly writing poetry begsthe issue) is generally believed to undermine sci-entific authority.38 It can put the writer in the“wrong” intellectual camp, and that can have se-vere career consequences for research funding,promotions, and other political concerns. Someof the resistance is simply against passion in dis-course (see Fabian, 1994, p. 100; Taussig, 1987).For holistic anthropology (with its interest inpreserving the four-field character of the disci-pline: cultural anthropology, archaeology, physi-cal anthropology, and linguistics), the real dan-ger in exaggerating the focus on “author-centrism”is slipping into a purely rhetorical or aesthetic le-gitimation of ethnography “by ontologizing rep-resentation, writing, and literary form” (Fabian,1994, p. 91). That may elide or preempt alto-gether the question of objectivity, which—as oneof the few gates of conversation open to reconcil-ing conventional scientific concerns with ad-vancing poetics and the need for epistemologicalstudy in ethnography—nevertheless is a ne-glected issue in postmodern anthropology (Fa-bian, 1994, p. 91; see also Megill, 1994; Tiles,1984). In the middle of it all is an ongoing confu-sion between powerful explanation and good vo-cabulary (Rorty, 1981, p. 158; see alsoAbrahams, 1986; Brady, 1991b).

Lamenting the generally sad state of anthro-pological discourse today—that it is often “pain-ful to read,” enormously self-serving, corruptedwith esoteric and bland jargon, incestuous in itspreoccupations when it might be better servedwith a more outward vision of its purposes andcommunication strategies—Tarn (1991) sug-gests that “if the latest generation writes well it


may be due to mass alienation from the aca-demic side of the discipline (with all its dangers)and to such phenomena as ‘ethnopoetics’ ”(p. 56)—with its emphasis on comparative ex-pression. A properly modern anthropologywould find a way to reintegrate its writing of sci-ence and its humanisms. “It would pay thegreatest attention to the way in which . . . eth-nography was written, striving to go beyondbelles lettres toward a language with scientificand literary properties both, but governed pri-marily by literature, so that its results couldbe available to all culturally literate readers”(Tarn, 1991, p. 57). Addressing in particularwhat authors have attempted in what he calls“auto-anthropologies” (“personal ethnography,”“reflexive ethnography,” and so on; seeCrapanzano, 1980; Dumont, 1978; Rabinow,1977), Tarn (1991) says that such efforts runparallel to his “argument that the genre so longlooked for which would assure a complete un-ion of the poetic and anthropological enter-prises [without reducing either completely tothe other, without sacrificing the option of lop-sided emphasis, of an anti-union, or of for allpractical purposes complete independence inthe conscious formulation of anthropologicaldiscourse] (should such be desirable) lies not inthe keeping of the anthropologist who cannot,for all his/her efforts, get beyond belles lettres,but with the poet who, in theory, still can. This isthe question of a language which, without turn-ing away from scientific veracity, abdicates notone jot of its literary potential. Undoubtedlyutopian, the search is at home in poetry, incur-ably utopian, and probably nowhere else”(p. 256; see also Richardson, 1994; Rose,1991b).

As poets, anthropologists still have to getsome purchase on their audiences. Will it be po-etry addressed to the existing elite, to anthro-pologists as such, perhaps as a form of extend-ing the ethnographic tradition, or addressed to“the people at large, or that section of it whichhas not been consumerized out of existence as areading and listening public?” (Tarn, 1991,p. 64). Market matters, and some poetry pub-lished in the social sciences is of dubious qualityby literary standards and therefore less market-able.39 But what makes the distinction? What is

defensibly good or agreeably bad poetry? Thereis a whole industry of writing about this in gen-eral, of course, and there has been since the firstcritics forayed as experts into a world not oftheir own making. I will not attempt to sort thatpile out here, especially at the level of craft (al-though such discussion is relevant), except toecho some early-in-the-century thinking by I. A.Richards (1929): “It is less important to like‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad,’ than to be ableto use them both as a means of ordering ourminds”; and that what matters is the quality ofthe reading we give to poems, “not the correct-ness with which we classify them” as good orbad, right or wrong (p. 327). The ease withwhich a poem might slip into the mind to goodeffect is as much a function of the reader’s sus-ceptibility by topic and variable inclination toappropriate such things as it is a function ofform. There may be wide agreement on thevalue of a particular poem or body of work, butthere are no absolutes of poetic stimulation andeffectiveness. Much depends on the situation athand. As with any text, the same poem cantravel with very different effects across personaland cultural boundaries.

Nonetheless, after all is said and done, per-haps we can agree that the most effective poetrystirs something up in you—an emotion or pas-sion that reaches beyond the shallow, that gravi-tates to deeper experiences and the sublime.The best of it is powerfully orienting, inspira-tional, if not more directly mantic or pro-phetic.40 In ethnographic or cross-cultural po-etry, the effect is likely to be a significant realiza-tion of identity with what otherwise could notpossibly be claimed as Own. Through wordsand their specialized forms, a kinship is evokedthat is grounded in empathy and interpreta-tion. It huddles with the universality of beinghuman and sends a large message: Perhaps weare all Cheyenne, Arapaho, Tuvaluan, and Ik.Perhaps we are also all ethnographers now, asRose (1991b, 1993) says. The best poets canmake these things work as ideas and as plat-forms for social action (compare Rothenberg,1994).

The late anthropologist-poet-social-activistStanley Diamond (1987), reflecting on the ugly,the beautiful, and the sublime in poetry (and


quarreling with Keats’s famous line that “athing of beauty is a joy for ever”), wrote:

The mere deepening of gratification from the“joyful” experience of beauty as truth does notachieve the sublime. The experience of the sub-lime is both transcendental and quintessentiallycultural at the same time. Language itself is thetranscendence of the biological, it is the me-dium of culture, and culture is a rope-bridgethrown across a biological chasm. As the objec-tive realizations of the human essence, that is, asthe existentializing of our human possibilities,culture(s) is the arena for the construction ofmeanings: it represents a struggle that is con-stant and renewed in each generation, and evi-dent in the lives of individuals as they strive tobecome cultured human beings. . . . There areno certainties here, only struggle and contin-gency, pain and realization. Gratification, satis-faction, or happiness are not at issue. But, weencounter joy. This is the joy that one finds inLear, as he hurls his words into the terrible gulfthat engulfs him. The joy is in the words, in hismatured sensibility, in his challenge to natureand human defeat. The joy is in the challenge,and in the formulation of his meanings. Or ob-serve the final shuffling off of guilt by Oedipusat Colonnus, as Sophocles etherealizes him in abeam of light. Or the conclusion of theWinnebago medicine rite, when the initiate fi-nally achieves his emancipation from society,after bearing all the abuse that society may heapupon him. Or, for that matter, the ordinary ritu-als of maturing and variegated experienceknown in every primitive society, wherebygrowth is attended by pain, where a new namemay be earned, and where the past is arduouslyincorporated into the present, preparing the in-dividual for the next ritual round as he moveshigher in the spiritual hierarchy of his society.That is where the joy is. And finally, it is this joy,not Keats’s beauty or truth, which defines thesublime, beyond the confines of the merely aes-thetic, breaking all the formal rules of aesthet-ics, beyond the range of the romantic imagina-tion. For we are not talking of imagination here,but of experience and its meanings, whether inthe culture of dreams, the culture of the hunt,or in the ceremonies of rebirth. And finally, I amtalking of the sacred space, the sacred silencethat lies beyond language, but remainsgrounded in language. (pp. 270-271; compareBurke, 1958)

All but the most serious and sensitive writerswould be hard-pressed to capture these exis-tential dimensions in generally accessible lan-

guage. Ethnopoets strive for such experience andcommunication, even as they eschew as unrealis-tic any expectations of ever reducing the sacredor the sublime to strictly clinical or analyticforms. A battle is fit on this very quest: If the art-ist sees it, she believes she has some prospect ofsaying it poetically, of conveying with less pros-pect of empirical distortion the nature of the ex-perience as panhuman emotion; if the scientistsees it or grips its “felt meaning,” she can onlyhasten its transformation into something else(or some things else) by attempting to appropri-ate and express it through clinical forms. Ei-ther way, there is a problem. Coleridge’s “TheRime of the Ancient Mariner” refuses reductionto the subject of sailors and seawater or to criticalsummaries of its formal properties and inspira-tions, just as the statistical expression of cross-cultural trait distributions in the ancient MiddleEast cannot yield its exactness and rhetorical in-tegrity to interpretive statements high in poeti-city or uncommon metaphor.41 Poetizing suchthings may reveal new dimensions of the prob-lem, to be sure, and that can be a profound con-tribution to humanistic concerns, but it is notnecessarily a proper substitute for the originalstatement or form. While the upshot of suchthings can be shared widely in language, culture,and experience, the confining exactitudes ofcompeting poetic and scientific linguistic formsrestrict movements and thus hook again into thatentangled truth of disciplinary and intellec-tual discourse: Not all subjects travel equallywell.42 The movement is not hopeless. Transla-tion is possible. But it is by definition a changingframe.

Beyond that we need to ask who does the poetspeak for? There is debate over this in anthropol-ogy, not only for its poets but for all of its writers,as there is in every discipline that has entered thecrisis of representation. Sticking to anthropolog-ical poets for the moment, for they may havestretched the forms of representation in the so-cial sciences the most, consider Diamond’s(1982, p. 94) poem “Shaman’s Song”:

I talk to flowers

My fingertips withstand

The glance of roses


What do you know of the Bear

His body, my spirit

Rises everywhere

Seeing what the leaf sees

And the cloud

Ambiguous as a woman

Drifting through stones

I have lain with the otter

Under white water

On beds softer than birds

What do you know of the Fox

Bearing the message of death?

Diamond was not a shaman. He was not a Na-tive American, although the spirit of indigenouscultures of the Americas resonates through thiswork and through the multiple (Native Ameri-can, Anglo, and anthropomorphized animal)voices that structure his epic poem Going West(1986a).43 In these works, as in all others heproduced, especially in the waning years of hislife, Diamond aimed for the sublime by drawingon the Everyman he met time and again throughcross-cultural experience and by taking on thatpersona. Here was Aristotle’s universal—andDiamond’s mine. Penetrating and conspicuousexperiences were laid out before him like somuch crackable glass and Diamond felt it underhis feet with every cross-cultural step. Treadlightly, he said, and his poetry was the gatewaysign: “Things can break here.” In that he spokefor everyone, as brother, as kin, as alienated Jew,as Everyman who has ever suffered the greatsmotherings of life and identity that flow fromcross-cultural oppression. Translation andmultivoice reporting of human commonalitiesin purpose, interests, pasts, and futures were notonly possible, they were, to Diamond’s eternalcredit, imperative (see Rose, 1983/1991a).Everyman was for him simultaneously author,subject, and audience, a social unit whose vari-able parts were collapsed into reciprocalself-awareness through the rituals of poetry.

Two related themes found throughout Dia-mond’s work, including his provocative “Howto Die in America” (1986b), are that individualsand cultures transcend that which consumesthem, no matter how painful the circumstances,or perhaps because of the pain, and that vast un-intended consequences come from colonial can-nibalizing, with its miles and miles of cross-cul-tural casualties on the beachheads of the world,in Biafra, India, New Mexico, the Dakotas, NewYork, and California—not to mention the greaterasures of tribal peoples in Russia, Spain, Iraq,Australia, China, and the other Americas. Dia-mond’s poetry seems to come from everywherebecause his quest for internalizing and express-ing the sublime had no firm cultural boundaries.Transcultural mysteries and truths were in hisview everywhere subject to appropriationthrough the carefully opened eye and ear, oncesaturated with experience. Diamond believedthat no culture could hide its fundamental lifefrom the prying eyes of the mystic or the excava-tions of the traveling poet, especially when amature social scientist carried them both on hisshoulders. His discourse was full of crossoversand changing centers. He knew that anthropol-ogy struggled for such knowledge and he be-lieved that none of it would come without intel-lectual passion in discovery and representation.By shucking preconceptions to the best of hisability and immersing himself in the lives of oth-ers, he devoted the last years of his life to sayingthese things through poetry, having been, as hesaid, “first a poet, then an anthropologist, then apoet again” (personal communication, March1983; see also Diamond, 1982; Rose, 1991b).His writings make it obvious that he never reallychanged professions, only from time to time hismanner of professing.

Is the truth of Diamond’s poetic work mixedup with beauty and yet anchored empirically invalid ethnography (compare McAllister, 1998)?Is it best judged as poetry, as skill in form,plussed by the enJOYment or illuminating andedifying introspection it produces? Or is it bestjudged like all fiction, not exclusively or neces-sarily in terms of its historical accuracy, but on asliding scale of erotics and believability in the


realm of being human? Does it stir somethingvaluable up in us, perhaps rare or otherwise un-obtainable, even as it rings true on life as weknow it, or argue it, or both? These are but afew problematic slices of Geertz’s (1973) claimthat all ethnography is in important ways fic-tional—something constructed, somethingfashioned, and never from whole cloth. Thecrisis of representation in anthropology fol-lowed most directly from that pioneeringwork. The poets have never held center stage inthe ensuing melee, but we can assert here thatthe fundamental issues of ethnographic repre-sentation do not change for conspicuously po-etic versus more clinical texts. They are textualthrough and through, no matter what the pur-ported form of representation.44

By the same token, as convention wouldhave it in society generally, and specifically inthe curious mix of subtle inferences, method-ological mandates, and editorial imperialism inthe Western world concerning appropriate lan-guage for scientific reporting, the form of ad-dress often depends heavily on the nature ofthe problem to be addressed. As it happens,Miles Richardson (1998a) says, “social scien-tists have long turned to poetry” as a reporto-rial mode, but the content generally has di-verged from the academic centers of theirfieldwork and therefore from a collision coursewith more conventional forms of ethnographicreporting: “Their poems . . . rarely addressedthe rich ethnographic record they compilednor the anguish they felt about the free individ-ual encountering coercive culture” (p. 461).Some of the most notable poetry written by an-thropologists in previous generations—by Ed-ward Sapir, Loren Eiseley, and Ruth Benedict,who make up most of a short list—was simi-larly decentered as ethnography per se butcompetitive enough to be published innonanthropological media oriented towardsuch concerns. But no anthropology journalscatered to such interests, and the mainstreamsentiment was generally then what it is now:Poetry is an aside, an amusement, that belongselsewhere. Other than what might be called a“poetic mentality” in the humanism of the

times, and for some an affinity with theenticingly poetic work of Sir James Frazer, therewas no ideology afoot that might sponsor or en-franchise a more specifically poetic genre of an-thropological writing, including poetry.

That climate has changed perceptibly withthe growth of more explicitly interpretive worksin the field, that is, with the advent of post-modernism, the growth of “textualism” becauseof its focus on text construction and consump-tion, and the linguistic emphases of influentialstructuralists such as Jakobson (1987) andLévi-Strauss (1962). Iain Prattis’s Reflections:The Anthropological Muse (1986), a collection ofpoetry and artwork specifically addressed tofieldwork experiences by cultural anthropolo-gists and linguists, established a precedent. Sodid reviews of Stanley Diamond’s and PaulFriedrich’s poetry in anthropology’s flagshipjournal, the American Anthropologist, in theearly 1980s.45 At a time when much of this was atleast a source of heated debate in the field, theneditor George Marcus published Diamond’s“How to Die in America” (1986b) poem in thefirst volume of Cultural Anthropology. As the ed-itor of Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly,Miles Richardson initiated a poetry and fictioncompetition that featured the winners in thejournal. The competition has been continued bythe present editor, Edith Turner, and by her po-etry editor, Dell Hymes, and the topics con-tinue to widen. Friedrich’s Bastard Moons(1979a), Diamond’s Going West (1986a), andDennis Tedlock’s Turner Prize-winning DaysFrom a Dream Almanac (1990) “explore issuesof language, ethnographic truth, and shamanicdreams” (Richardson, 1998a, p. 461). Recentpoetry in the American Anthropologist, underthe editorship of Barbara and Dennis Tedlock,includes contributions by Friedrich (1995),Hymes (1995), and Richardson (1998b) on a va-riety of themes central to ethnographic experi-ence. A new journal devoted to poetry, poetics,ethnography, and cultural and ethnic studies,called appropriately Cross-Cultural Poetics [Xcp]and edited by Mark Nowak, published its first is-sue in 1997. Now the journal Qualitative In-quiry, under the editorship of Yvonna Lincoln


and Norman Denzin, is following suit (seeBrady, 1998a; Richardson, 1998a). It will carrypoetry and fiction as regular features, not be-cause it is trendy to do so, say the editors, but be-cause “social scientists have for too long ignoredthese important forms of ethnographic repre-sentation and interpretation” (N. K. Denzin,personal communication, November 8, 1998).

Looking in another direction, if the anthro-pologist-poets have been few in number to date(albeit increasing in the postmodern afterglow),anthropology as a whole has inspired numerouspoets from other disciplines. “Poets preciselybecause of their ‘otherness’ in their home societ-ies are attuned to otherness wherever it may befound. Hence they find an affinity, and to theirown delight a social affinity, with the fruits ofother cultures, particularly those of the ‘de-spised and rejected’ ” (Turner, 1983, p. 339). Towhich Tarn (1991) adds: “The inspiration thatanthropology has afforded poets—to go no fur-ther back than Pound or Eliot, or St. John Perseand Segalen, or Neruda, Vallejo, and Paz, in theage of Frazer, Harrison, or the author of FromRitual to Romance—to say nothing of Marx andEngles, Freud or Jung, Mauss, Durkheim orLévi-Strauss—can scarcely be said to haveabated when we now have a virtual school of‘ethnopoetics’ devoted both to the accessing of‘primitive and archaic poetries’ into our culturethrough the best available techniques of twenti-eth century translation and to the mutual effectupon each other of such poetries and ourown—granted that Native poets very much con-tinue to produce poetry all over this world”(p. 63).

Anticipating mutual effects, it is reasonableto ask where one goes with a penchant to writepoetry in anthropology. Just adopting poetry asa form of writing guarantees nothing. But po-etry can be informative and useful, even exhila-rating when it reaches the sublime. Properlycast, it can be both fire bellows for and bubblinglid on the pot of intellectual life, a source oftransformation that is admirably unquiet in anyposition: It “turns everything into life. It is thatform of life that turns everything into language”(Meschonnic, 1988, p. 90). It is in fact an art“far larger than any description of its powers”

(Vendler, 1988, p. 6). For these reasons and oth-ers already detailed, some competition betweenpoetry and science as genres may in fact be“healthy and entertaining” (Fabian, 1990,p. 766), even functional (Brady, 1993). It fol-lows that having a hall full of poets (as night-marish as that may seem to some scientists) cangive academies of arts and sciences a better over-all pulse, if not a better future of discourse anddiscovery. Writing poetry has also “helped indi-vidual anthropologists to overcome alienationfrom experience” (Fabian, 1990, p. 766) andthat, as much as anything, has serious implica-tions for engaging postmodern concerns aboutauthority in ethnography. The penchant of theanthropologist to wax poetic, if honed andpointed in these ways, can push into the heartof ethnographic contemplation, epistemology,and theory. Hanging out in that zone for a while(as nightmarish as that may seem to some poets)might give way to progress in the conversationover what divides us so readily in the academytoday.

There are many other paths to that end, ofcourse. Poetry is not necessarily the right toolfor every job. As the old adage goes, if one hasonly a hammer to work with, after a while ev-erything starts to look like a nail. In this in-stance, “To seek the solution for a problem re-garding the production of knowledge indifferent or better representations of knowl-edge is to reaffirm, not to overcome, therepresentationist stance,” with all of its compul-sions to order in conceptions of language andculture and related problems (Fabian, 1990,p. 766; see also Friedrich, 1979b). Remainingattentive to “the transformative, creative as-pects of ethnographic knowledge” (Fabian,1990, p. 766) is not entailed automatically bywriting poetry (or reproducing dialogues) as analternative to strict representational ethnogra-phy. “To preserve the dialogue with our inter-locutors, to assure the Other’s presence againstthe distancing devices of anthropological dis-course, is to continue conversing with the Otheron all levels of writing, not just to reproduce di-alogues” (Fabian, 1990, p. 766) or to slip unwit-tingly from being “natural historians into itiner-ant bards, clowns, or preachers” in a humanistic


or poetic commitment to “being with others”(Fabian, 1990, pp. 766-767; see also Tarn,1991, p. 75). We can do better—and more.

One more thing to do in this writer’s arenais to counter sole reliance on the centrifugal or“distancing” devices of anthropological dis-course—the “Others are never Us” ideas, sub-stituting third-person writing for first-personexperiences, writing in the ethnographic pres-ent, and so on. Developing alternatives de-pends on paying special attention to the pro-cesses through which ethnographic knowledgeis produced in the first place (Fabian, 1994).46

That does not require a lapse into the old staticmodels of structuralism, although much ofwhat a poetics yields as the sublime might beseen as the recognition of common deep struc-tures (langue) in a variable field of surface par-ticulars (parole). Certainly there is room forsome edifying resuscitation here. But the move-ment to more centripetal or “closing” dis-course in anthropology should at minimum in-clude an ontological and ethnopoetic emphasison the performative aspects of culture, thosethat can be “acted out,” as opposed to focusingexclusively on the more limited category of“what members of a culture know [that] is ‘in-formative’ in the sense that it can be elicitedand produced as discursive information” (Fa-bian, 1994, p. 97).47

Such concerns necessarily draw ethnog-raphers and poets into the larger philosophicalfields of process, structure, and agency—in-cluding the dynamics of knowledge and ritual,theater and history (see Brady, 1999; Richard-son, 1994)—and thereby increase the pros-pects of producing larger-level understandingsof the experiential fields we draw from as ob-servers and contribute to as actors and writers.But it should also be remembered that the origi-nal point of creative mystery in every study isalso where the Muses call on the writer, andthat is precisely “where humanistic anthropol-ogy must both stall the process of knowing andopen it up intellectually—where we must catchourselves in the act of rushing headlong intoconventional formats, of jumping to conclu-sions about where the experience must take usand how to communicate it to others, and be-

gin to build a successful poetics into the frame-work” (Brady, 1991b, p. 20). By attempting toreconcile the spread in this connection betweenanalytic problems and the substance of field-work, anthropological poetics can do more thancapture (or create) and convey the poetries andliteratures of various cultures. It can requiregreater philosophical justification for itsethnographic endeavors and at the same timehelp to erase some unnecessary distortions of de-tachment from its objects of inquiry.

u Coda

Here, then, is the poetic turf more anthropolo-gists than ever are traversing nowadays. It isneither defined nor covered exclusively by an-thropologists or traditional anthropological in-terests. As observers of common problems (inand out of their own societies), anthropologistsdiffer in research methods and strategies andsometimes produce incomparable results. Add-ing other disciplines from the wings only seemsto complicate matters. But common ground forall is not beyond the pale. One source of that foranthropologists and other social scientists is thatthey all seek ways of “speaking in the name of thereal” about the people and behaviors theystudy—of representing fairly and accuratelywhat cannot easily be known or demonstrated inthe foggy partialities of cross-cultural experi-ence, the imperfections of culturally situated ob-servations, and the many voices insinuated inmutually constructed truths (compare Brady,1983, 1991c). Another, as poet Tarn (1991) says,lies in the knowledge that “nothing can hidefrom us for long the fact that we all face the sameproblems in the end; that the poetic fate, like thehuman, is universal” (p. 14).

Discovering and assessing the common de-nominators of human existence has always hadsome priority in anthropology,48 and the need tobridge the inherently hermeneutic studies of eth-nography and larger-level statements about thewhole organism (universals of language, culture,cognition, and behavior) is getting renewed at-tention—in full view of past limitations, such as


incommensurate theory construction, languagebiases, political and pragmatic relations be-tween ethnographers and the groups they study,the impossibility of absolute objectivity, and theneed for successful measures of validity inethnographic assertions.49 But the poets havetraditionally approached human commonalitiesdifferently, hanging more on meaning than be-havior—more on humanistic interpretationsthan clinically validatable truths. From the per-spective of anthropological poetics, resurrect-ing a systematic scientific examination of whatis universal in life and culture—“thinking big”again (see Simpson, 1994)—is more than a bigtask. It requires jumping the gap of irony andparadox from a great (Geertzian) descent intodetails of local knowledge, “thick descriptions,”and related critical intellectual developmentsover the past 20 years, back into the whole pack-age of logical positivist methods and assump-tions that have been criticized so extensively bythe great descenders. Besides, as Aristotle dis-covered, the poets’ generality is exposed in therich particulars of their work. The poets believethat the commonalities of life can be pluckedfrom there by large-minded observers of what-ever persuasion. Whether or not these apparentsharings can be defended as unassailable or uni-versal truths by other standards is another mat-ter. The paths for collecting them are different,so are the logbooks, and therefore the form ofthe arguments down the line. Scientists nor-mally create conglomerates from heavily laun-dered particulars, drawn from wide fields ofclinically cut cloth, to reach their generalities.

So which to choose? No matter which ex-treme is harnessed—soft art, hard science—letme reiterate what can be called by now (via mypressing redundancies) the maxim that somethings can’t be said exactly or as effectively anyother way. Extremes are validated and perpetu-ated by that defensible fact, even as the propo-nents themselves exaggerate it in their bookendfights over turf and exclusivity. But what aboutthe stretch in between? Rifts are made to bemended; the challenge in gulfs is to bridge them.The boldest of anthropology’s new interpretersand poets have gone halfway around the hornsof this problem by trying to raise the illumina-

tion of our human commonalities to an art formwithout losing the ability to inform more tradi-tional social science concerns at the same time,in part on the premise that the collective workof scientists and poets is in the broadest viewcomplementary. In the pool of common knowl-edge, the pattern is ancient and very human:many in the one, one in the many. How youtravel depends on where you start. The destina-tion is in the longest of long runs the same: theaudiovisual room, the bookshelf, the electroniclibrary, and, perhaps above all else, the mirror inthe center of the house of Who-Are-We?50 In-quiring minds want to know. We have alwayswanted to know. Who has the key? Never mind.There seems to be more than one door and someof them aren’t locked. See you inside.

[Refrain: Is this just more anthropologicalborrowing from the multiple-reality world ofphysics? No. An argument for uncompromisingrelativism, or just for tolerance of diversity of ar-gument and approach in the absence of an over-arching paradigm for cultural anthropology?Neither. Do ethnographic methods have to be re-duced to “deep hanging out” (Geertz, 1998)?No. Do we have to abandon the search for com-mensurate theories and universals of language,culture, and behavior? No. Should we force nos-talgia-driven models of the past on presentethnographic research for the next millennium?No need to ask. Won’t work.]

n Notes

1. But compare Bachelard (1964) on the“poetics of space,” Bachelard (1971) on the“poetics of reverie,” Brown (1977) on a “poeticfor sociology,” and Hallyn (1990) on the “poeticstructure of the world.”

2. For ethnographers, the poetic focus oncommunications about other cultures is as mucha concern about how the story of fieldwork istold as anything else. See Bruner (1984), Prattis(1986), Van Maanen (1988), Manganaro(1990a), Brady (1991a), and O’Nell (1994).

3. See Beaujour (1987, p. 470) and Fischer(1988, p. 8); compare Burke (1989, p. 188),Krupat (1992, pp. 51-52), Robbins (1987), Tarn


(1991, p. 63), Tsing (1994), and James, Hockey,and Dawson (1997).

4. See Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1967, 1969),Riffaterre (1970), Scholes (1974), Culler (1975,1977), Todorov (1977, 1981), and Harland(1987).

5. See Boon (1972), Todorov (1981),Eagleton (1983), Brady (1991a), and Brooks(1994). The burgeoning domain of “culturalstudies” also begs the question of disciplinarydivision and proprietary interests in these sub-jects (compare Marcus, 1998). Although thereis much more in book form and articles else-where using this label, a comparison of therange of interests covered in the literary jour-nals Cultural Critique and Poetics Today relativeto those of the American Anthropologist, Cul-tural Anthropology, and Anthropology and Hu-manism is instructive.

6. See Turner (1974, 1982a, 1982b),Bauman (1977, 1992), Schechner (1985, 1995),Graham (1995), Dening (1996), and Brady(1999).

7. Drawing on the oral behavior of thespeech community, for example, ethnopoet Da-vid Antin (1983), paraphrasing Dell Hymes,writes: “All over the world in a great variety oflanguages people announce, greet, take leave,invoke, introduce, inquire, request, demand,command, coax, entreat, encourage, beg, an-swer, name, report, describe, narrate, interpret,analyze, instruct, advise, defer, refuse, apolo-gize, reproach, joke, taunt, insult, praise, dis-cuss, gossip. Among this grab-bag of human lan-guage activities are a number of more or lesswell-defined universal discourse genres, whoseexpectation structures are the source of all po-etic activity. If there is any place that we shouldlook for an ETHNOPOETICS it is here, amongthese universal genres, where all linguistic in-vention begins. . . . I take the ‘poetics’ part ofETHNOPOETICS to be . . . the structure ofthose linguistic acts of invention and discoverythrough which the mind explores the trans-formational power of language and discoversand invents the world itself ” (p. 451). Albeit lessdynamic in orientation and less concerned withcultural process than product, there is also con-nective tissue in that perception for structuralstudies of the ways what has been discoveredand invented is put into place in particular soci-eties, that is, the logical and symbolic arrange-ments that characterize the cognitive contentand social relations of whole cultures (including

anthropology itself—see Boon, 1982, 1984,1989; Brady, 1993).

8. For more on dialogics, see Tedlock (1983,1987b), Hill (1986), Feld (1987), Holquist(1990), Weiss (1990), Brady (1991b), Bruner andGorfain (1991), Duranti (1993), and Emerson(1997).

9. See Harland (1987), Clifford and Marcus(1986), Clifford (1988), Fabian (1994), Marcus(1998), and Geertz (1998).

10. See, for example, Tarn (1991), Wilk(1991), Scott (1992), and Brady and Turner(1994).

11. See also Rothenberg (1981, 1985),Swann (1983), Tedlock (1983), Tedlock andTedlock (1985), Kroskrity (1985), and Sherzerand Woodbury (1987). On the anthropology offolk narratives, see Jackson (1982), Wilbert andSimoneau (1982), Swann (1983), Sherzer andWoodbury (1987), Narayan (1989), Abu-Lughod(1993), Basso (1995), Graham (1995), Candreand Echeverri (1996), and Reichel-Dolmatoff(1996).

12. Compare D. Tedlock (1972, 1985,1987a, 1991, 1993), Culler (1977, p. 8),Riffaterre (1984), Sherzer (1987), and Graham(1995).

13. If not literature per se—see, for example,Spradley and McDonough (1973), Langness andFrank (1978), Dennis and Aycock (1989), Han-dler (1983, 1985, 1990), Handler and Segal(1987), Richardson (1990), and Benson (1993).

14. See also Marcus and Fischer (1986), Han-dler (1983, 1985, 1990), Handler and Segal(1987), Fischer (1991), and Marcus (1998).

15. Of course, the whole enterprise is “inter-pretive.” Furthermore, interpretive anthropol-ogy—as part of the poststructuralist, deconstruc-tionist movement in contemporary philosophyand social science—is not necessarily (a)antiempirical (How can any discipline operatewithout an empirical ground?), (b) antiobjective(see Brady, 1991b; Rorty, 1979, pp. 361-363;Spiegelberg, 1975, pp. 72-73), or (c) antiscience(compare Barrett, 1996; Holton, 1993; Jennings,1983; Knauft, 1996; Lett, 1997; Maxwell, 1984;O’Meara, 1989; Sangren, 1991; Shankman,1984). But responsible social science of this kinddoes reject (as necessarily incomplete, amongother problems) dogmatic empiric-ism that fore-closes on the study of meaning in favor of an ex-clusive focus on behavior (see Brady, 1993,p. 277, n. 28; Fernandez, 1974; Polanyi &Prosch, 1975; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1987).


16. Following especially Geertz’s (1973)classic observations on a Balinese cockfight.

17. See Marcus and Fischer (1986, p. 72),Marcus (1980, 1998), Marcus and Cushman(1982), Boon (1972, 1982, 1989), Clifford andMarcus (1986), Fernandez (1974, 1985, 1986,1988, 1989), and much that has been publishedin the journal Cultural Anthropology, the discus-sion of anthropology and Irish discourse in Tay-lor (1996), and note 11, above, on folk narra-tives. See also Fischer (1988, 1989, 1991),Fabian (1990, p. 767: “If writing is part of a sys-tem of intellectual and political oppression of theOther, how can we avoid contributing to that op-pression if we go on writing?”), Manganaro(1990a), Tarn (1991), Karp and Levine (1991),Said (1991), Krupat (1992), Marcus’s (1993) re-view of Krupat, and Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, andCohen (1993) on some important aspects of thepoliticizing that follows from ethnographic en-capsulations of other people’s texts and customs.

18. See, for example, the best-selling novelsby Silko (1977) and Momaday (1989), and Slat-er’s (1982) ethnographic exegesis of Brazilianliteratura de cordel.

19. See, for example, Dennis and Aycock(1989), Rosaldo (1989), Manganaro (1990a), B.Tedlock (1991), Brady (1991b), Benson (1993),James et al. (1997), and Marcus (1998).

20. See, for example, Feld (1982), Jackson(1986), Turner (1987), Dennis (1989), Fox(1989), Stewart (1989), Richardson (1990), B.Tedlock (1992), Gottlieb and Graham (1993),Limón (1994), Behar (1993, 1996), Stewart(1996), and Dening (1998a, 1998b).

21. For related readings on textual authorityand ethnographic representation, see Geertz(1973, 1983, 1988, 1995, 1998), Lanser (1981),Bruner (1984), Fernandez (1985, 1986), Web-ster (1986), Fabian (1990), Weinstein (1990a,1990b), Simms (1991), Tsing (1994), Dening(1996, 1998a, 1998b), Rapport (1997), andBanks and Banks (1998); compare Taussig (1993)and Motzafi-Haller (1998). For a recent debateon who speaks for whom in historical ethnogra-phy, see Obeyesekere (1992), Sahlins (1996),and Borofsky (1997); compare Brady (1985).

22. On that account, see the diverse works ofLaFarge (1929), Bohannan (writing as ElenoreSmith Bowen, 1954), Turnbull (1962), Stewart(1962), Matthiessen (1963, 1975), Kurten(1980), Thomas (1987), Handy (1973), Thomp-son (1983), Jackson (1986), and Knab (1995);

compare the narrative form in Turner’s (1987)empathic memoir.

23. See Turnbull (1962, 1972), Rabinow(1977), Dumont (1978), Crapanzano (1980),Turner (1987), Dennis (1989), Dennis andAycock (1989), and B. Tedlock (1992).

24. See especially the innovative combina-tion of Gottlieb and Graham (1993), Fischer(1988) on Michel Leiris’s effort “to combinesympathetic observation of the Other, theunavoidability of literary self-inscription, andthe imperative of cultural critique” (p. 8); com-pare Beaujoir (1987), Tarn (1991), and Wolf(1992).

25. Tarn (1991) echoes a sentiment sharedby many about Lévi-Strauss: He might havebeen a creative writer with equal success, “hadhe chosen that path of expression” (p. 56).Manganaro (1990b) adds, “The writerly senseof Tristes Tropiques, importantly, arises not onlyout of a literary style adopted by the anthropolo-gist-author, but from the very perspectivethat the writer takes to his subject” (p. 16). Itis also noteworthy that Lévi-Strauss has beenroundly criticized for the formalism of hisother works (see, e.g., Eagleton, 1983; Geertz,1973, pp. 345-359; Harland, 1987; Prattis,1986; compare Boon, 1972, 1982; Brady,1993). The large-minded Lévi-Strauss seemsto have touched all the bases at one time or an-other.

26. A theme plainly visible in Dening (1980,1998a), Geertz (1998), and Borofsky (2000).

27. See Fox (1991), Poggie, DeWalt, andDressler (1992), Borofsky (1994), Barrett (1996),Jessor, Colby, and Shweder (1996), Knauft(1996), Denzin (1997), Lett (1997), James et al.(1997), Layton (1997), Rapport (1997), andMarcus (1998); compare O’Meara (1997).

28. For important statements on this prob-lem, see Wolf (1982), Fabian (1983), Borofsky(1987, 2000), Thomas (1989, 1991), andDening (1995, 1996).

29. See Rabinow (1983, 1984, 1986), Jarvie(1983), Wuthnow, Hunter, Bergesen, andKurzweil (1984), Ulin (1984), Rabinow andSullivan (1987), Boon (1982), Swearingen(1986), Loriggio (1990), Brady (1991a, 1993),Duranti (1993), and Rapport (1997); compareScholte (1966) for some earlier thinking, and,more recently, continuing the epistemologicaleffort in anthropology with smart and practicalarguments, Davies (1999).


30. See, for example, Reck’s (1978) Mexi-can ethnography, Rose (1993) on the death of“Malinowski-style” ethnography and the birthof a more poetic and multigenre manifesto as itsreplacement, Boon (1982, pp. 9-12) on some ofthe confusions of this style and its supposed dif-ferentiation as “ethnography” from the “arm-chair” speculations of Sir James George Frazer,Burke (1989, pp. 188ff.) on the need for anthro-pologists to “recognize the factor of rhetoric intheir own field” (Marcus, 1980), and Boon(1982) on “standards of ‘convincingness’ in var-ious cross-cultural styles and genres, just asthere are canons of verisimilitude in realist eth-nography” (p. 21).

31. For more on the relativity and eligibilityof such material as language games or similar fo-cus frames, see Guetti (1984), de Zengotita(1989), Denzin (1997), and Gellner (1998).

32. This is less true on both counts in lin-guistics—see, for example, Napoli and Rando(1979) and Bright (1983, 1985).

33. Dilemma is the other side of paradox.As Paul de Man once observed: “It is in the es-sence of language to be capable of origination,but of never achieving the absolute identity withitself that exists in the natural object. Poetic lan-guage can do nothing but originate anew overand over again; it is always constitutive, able toposit regardless of presence but, by the same to-ken, unable to give a foundation to what it pos-its except as an intent of consciousness” (quotedin Donoghue, 1989, p. 37).

34. See Vendler (1985, 1988) on the vari-able marginality of poetry. Not all cultures shareAmerica’s questionable valuation of poetry. Ithas conspicuously more status as an activityelsewhere (Brazil, Spain, England—to name afew). See Bishop and Brasil (1972), Lorde(1984, p. 87) on poetry being something otherthan a luxury, Tarn (1991, p. 15) on poetry’s“survival value” for humankind, Lavie (1990)and Behar’s (1993) sensitive and rich texts onthe tribulations of letting their poetry and po-etic mentalities out in oppressive contexts, andRichardson (1994) on poetry being a “practicaland powerful method for analyzing socialworlds” (p. 522).

35. Tarn (1991, p. 254) sees this as a kind ofcompetition of “vocations” that can be most dis-couraging in its personal, political, and philo-sophical entanglements. But it should be re-membered that these seemingly insurmountable

problems do not prevent great artists from alsobeing great scientists (and vice versa—e.g., Goe-the; see Gould, 1991), that “contempt for one isno qualification for citizenship in the other”(Brann, 1991, p. 775), and that the oppositionthat pits imagination against reason, when over-drawn on the battlegrounds of art and science,may be a kind “synecdochic fallacy” anyway—acategory mistake in its opposition (see Brady,1991a; Burke, 1989, p. 87).

36. For more on anthropological humanismand writing, see Wilk (1991) and Brady andTurner (1994); compare Harris (1997, p. 293)and Lett (1997).

37. See, for example, Lévi-Strauss (1961),Turnbull (1962, 1972), Van Lawick-Goodall(1971), Harris (1977, 1987), Dening (1980),Sahlins (1981, 1985, 1996), Jackson (1986),Thomas (1987), Rosaldo (1989), Narayan(1989), D. Tedlock (1990), Laderman (1991), B.Tedlock (1992), Rose (1993), and Behar (1993,1996). Fabian (1990) notes wryly that “Geertzprobably deserves credit for initiating the new lit-erary awareness in anthropology not so much be-cause he fraternized with literary critics but be-cause he dared to write well and got away with it”(p. 761). Fernandez (personal communication,February 27, 1998), playing on some of his owninfluential work (e.g., 1974, 1986), says thatGeertz is above all else a “master metaphorist.”

38. However, separating these genres and do-ing both can generate a laudable effect. Scientistswho also write novels, poetry, or very “literary”memoirs only seem to enhance their reputations(see, e.g., Levi, 1984; Lightman, 1993; Sagan,1980, 1985). On a related matter, when asked ifhis exercises in poetry improved his science, No-bel Prize-winning chemist and estimable poetRoald Hoffmann said no, at least not directly.Writing poetry for Hoffmann makes him feelbetter about himself as a person, as a human be-ing, and that helps his science considerably (per-sonal communication, February 26, 1997; seealso Chandrasekhar, 1987; Hoffmann, 1987,1990a, 1990b, 1995). Even with separation inpractice or redefinition in humanistic terms, thefunctional linkage of art-in-science cannot be de-nied. It may be less direct, less obvious, less ex-plored, and less reported than it could be. But it isalways present.

39. There are important exceptions. See, forexample, Friedrich (1979a), Diamond (1982,1986a, 1986b), some of Prattis (1986), various


contributions over the years to Anthropologyand Humanism (Quarterly), Fox (1989), Stewart(1989), Tedlock (1990), Richardson (1998a,1998b), and Flores (1999); compare Hall (1988)on phases in becoming a poet.

40. Leavitt (1997) is pioneering work on po-etry and prophecy, words and power, manticprose and ecstatic experiences—“stirrings” thatrange from the aesthetic and emotional to funda-mentally physical responses and their diversecultural expressions in ritual, politics, healing,and messianic movements, to name a few. Seealso Abu-Lughod (1986), Trawick (1988, 1997),Dobin (1990), and Csordas (1997).

41. See Fernandez (1974) for an importantargument (with discussion) on sensitivity to andthe mastery of metaphors (tropes) in ethno-graphic narration and related highly organizedexpressive activities, Lakoff and Johnson (1980)and Lakoff and Turner (1989) for a clear enunci-ation of common versus uncommon metaphorsin everyday life, Van Den Abbeele (1992) ontravel as a common metaphor and much that issmuggled into its use, and Fernandez (1986) andFernandez and Herzfeld (1998) on the place ofsocial and cultural poetics in the study of mean-ing in performance.

42. Playing out these constraints is in parthow logical positivism got to be known less asthe backbone of universally applicable methodsand more as a list of things that could not (orwere not allowed to) be studied in depth, or at all(e.g., meaning versus behavior, aesthetics andemotions, and so on).

43. It is not the same thing as letting multipleauthentic voices surface in a single text or perfor-mance (see Trawick, 1997), of course, but Dia-mond believed in—and displayed (by assumingthe roles of other speakers) in some of his po-etry—the prospect that some people could speakfor others to advantage for all on some occa-sions; that certain knowledge boundaries couldbe crossed with insight and power, without im-perialism or blind cultural exploitation, withouta franchise of superiority or oppressiveethnocentrism. Early in his Going West (1986a),for example, the anthropomorphized Otterspeaks for the Mohicans and Algonquins (as rep-resentatives of still other Native Americans)through esoteric knowledge of their impendingcollision with history: “Because we knew the fu-ture / And we understood their [Mohican, Al-gonquin] legends / Better than they did” (p. 11).

A larger point of this boundary crossing that isnot always obvious, especially where ethnicpride is at stake, is that indigenous identity does-n’t necessarily translate to expert on all thatcontextualizes it. Much depends on the form andcultural origins of the questions asked and thecultural and intellectual range of answers sought(see Brady, 1985).

44. There are no separate languages for sci-ence and poetry, only specialized vocabulariesand variable contexts—cultural “pre-texts” and“subtexts” that reassure, inform, and might evenmisinform through manipulations designed topresent the truth we want to find, as opposed tosomething that might be calculated throughother measures as more accurate, analyticallysatisfying, or less prejudicial. Moreover, there isplenty of slippage in the division of labor be-tween scientific and poetic texts. Asserting biascontrol, for example, including unmaskingethnocentrism, is seen as obligatory in scientificobservation. Disclosing observational bias di-rectly by emulating (“flagging”) it in perfor-mance and text is a poetic option that may ac-complish much the same thing, albeit through aradically different channel and probably for dif-ferent ends. Here, as elsewhere, context is prac-tically everything for determining meaning, andon occasion it can itself be all but slave toauthorial intentions and sociolinguistic form.

45. As book review editor of the AmericanAnthropologist at the time, I commissioned thesereviews (see Rose, 1983/1991a; Tyler, 1984).One earlier and interesting example of poetry inthe AA was published by then editor Sol Tax. Re-ferred to as “Puzzled Ph.D. Candidate,” andpublished anonymously (Anonymous, 1954),the poem was sent to Tax by Melville Herskovits,who took it off the bulletin board at the Depart-ment of Anthropology, Northwestern Univer-sity. It was actually “Wasn’t It a Thought Titanic”by then graduate student (and now anthropolo-gist and poetics scholar at the University of Chi-cago) James W. Fernandez.

46. For special takes on the production ofethnographic knowledge, see Borofsky (1987,2000), Geertz (1973, 1983, 1988, 1995, 1998),Dening (1980, 1996, 1998a, 1998b), Brady(1991b), and Behar (1993, 1996).

47. See also Tedlock (1983, 1990), Schech-ner (1985, 1995), Fernandez (1988), Graham(1995), Dening (1996), and Taylor (1996). Po-etry, of course, fits into the performative tradi-


tions of its makers directly, and it can be an im-portant source for understanding indigenoushistories. As Charlot (1985) says of Hawaiianpoetry, “The fact that poetry has been used fre-quently for important occasions and purposessuggests that it has a utility thus far overlookedby historians” (p. 29). See also Vendler (1995,p. 6) on the historical meaning of rhythms,stanza forms, personae, and genre; andFernandez and Herzfeld (1998) for a strong ar-gument that “poetic principles guide all effec-tive and affective social interaction” (p. 94) anda discussion of how that articulates with theproblem of performativity in human action gen-erally.

48. See Brown (1991) and Lévi-Strauss’swhole corpus of writings; see also Whitten(1988) and Kilbride (1993),

49. See, for example, Jessor et al. (1996),Shore (1996), Bloch (1998), and Brady(1998b); compare Wierzbicka (1996).

50. Some poets live there, along with agroup of narcissists, clever historians, and atinhorn totalitarian or two. They are visited reg-ularly by social and natural scientists. The pro-ject is to see what makes the residents tick. Theproblem is that everyone in the room is ticking.Everyone is looking back at everyone who’slooking at. Nobody knows for sure who’s study-ing whom, or, for that matter, whose conversa-tion should dominate. Somebody said there wasorder in the chaos. Two poets and the ghost ofAristotle said, “We told you so.” Two scientistswanted to bottle it but couldn’t get a grip on ei-ther its substance or its meaning. New schoolsof methods grew up in the exact spot of this dis-covery. A plaque marks it to this very day: THEFOUNTAIN OF MUSES STARTED HERE.LANGUAGE OF TRUTH SOLD NEAR HERE.PLEASE DO NOT LOITER.

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Anthropological Poetics